At The Blue Dolphin: On Mothers and Sons

1.
I pick the place because it’s intimate, a silver train car turned diner, turned Italian restaurant. On the Monday night after Thanksgiving, the Blue Dolphin is chock full of Christmas. Tinsel and twinkling lights drip from the barrel roofed ceiling. Holiday music fills the bullet-shaped space in a cloud of pre-seasonal profusion.

My son, Nathaniel, swings his messenger bag into the booth beside him and tips his phone, checking the time. We have over an hour until his train arrives, to take him back to the city. The weekend was filled with aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, his younger sister who has now gone back to college, his new girlfriend who returned to New York the day before, and even his father who now lives out of state. I’ve waited through all the meals with all those people, followed by the slow steady parade of his high school friends. I’ve waited to sit with Nathaniel alone, to see what I’m still allowed. But in the car, on our way here, I nicked a nerve. I asked about a job prospect, a job for which he’d called a college mentor requesting a recommendation, and was in turn told by that mentor to write the letter himself, then forward it for signing. “Can’t anyone do what they’re supposed to fucking do in this world,” he’d yelled as we hurtled down the dark highway.

“I’m not really hungry,” he says now, running his eyes down the menu. Somehow I take this personally, as if I have been cooking all day, preparing every item on the long laminated menu just for him. I suggest we share something.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know I’ll be hungry later, and no one will be offering to buy me dinner then.”

The waiter comes with the two glasses of red wine we ordered. I ask Nathaniel what he wants for Hanukkah and Christmas. He tells me he needs new boots and a waterproof jacket for the winter. “New York is cold,” he says. “Colder than it should be.”

“The coldest place on earth, some days,” I say. I think of telling him about the apartment his father and I lived in when we were his age, how frequently we had no heat for weeks at a time. In the mornings, we’d warm water on the stove in a lobster pot, then take turns pouring it over one another in the shower. At night, the first one home would crank the stove to 400 and arrange two chairs around the opened oven door.

Instead, I say, “Hey, I know you’re upset about what happened with the job, but your anger…It didn’t seem confined to the subject at hand.” The table between us rocks. The post cards of Roman landmarks beneath the glass tabletop quake in rhythm with his tapping foot. I brace myself. Here it comes, I think. He’s going to let me have it. Tell me I’ve ruined his life by leaving is father.

“Sorry, Mum,” he says. His newly bearded face softens. Slowly he slips one arm then the other out of his jacket. He looks across at me. “I didn’t…It’s just such a fucking scramble, all the time, every day, money in, money out. I spend all my time chasing down day jobs.” He tells me how perilous it can feel trying to do theatre in New York. “The soundtrack is just a running tally of numbers from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep at night.”

As he talks, I think again of that apartment with the intermittent heat, and I try to rekindle how I felt at 22. What I remember best was a kind of fatigue, as if I were exhausting myself, literally canceling myself out, a botched equation in which my frustration was exactly as potent as my ambition, my hunger for the future equal to my devouring anxiety at its potential disappointment.

“I’m on the subway like hours and hours every day. There was one day, I hit every borough except for Staten Island. Sometimes, during hour three or four on the train, I’ll see a baby in a stroller, all bundled and sleeping, and I’ll have that split second envy, you know. There’s always one who makes it look so appealing.”

I reach across the untouched plate of calamari between us and pat his arm.

“The thing about the R train, though…Do you know this, Mum? Have you ever ridden the R from Brooklyn to Manhattan?”

I shake my head.

“God, you have to. When it emerges from underground as it crosses the East River…The view…It stuns me, every time. I never take it for granted, that view.”

This is what I’ve been waiting for, a glimpse of the pilot light we share. If I have given this child nothing else, I want to be sure I’ve instilled in him the top-hat, white-gloves thrill of what makes life exquisite.

This boy, now a man, and I had forged a bond out of 6,000 or 7,000 days together, the first thousand without his younger sister. I was not an athletic mother, nor was I much of a game player. I hadn’t been those things when I was a child, either. Rather, my chief pleasure as a kid had been dwelling in the parallel universe of my imagination, a world so complete and so comforting I often had trouble leaving it. My initial entry into that realm had been through the stories my father read to me. Knowing what had made me happy as a child, I tried to do the same for my son. And it just happened that his joy was not unlike mine. The world of the books I read to him — at first the ones with more pictures than words — became a space in which we existed together. It wasn’t just that I was reading him a story and we were each relating back to that mediating experience, it was as if we’d both entered the same conjured notion, as palpable as the room in which we sat. It was this agreed upon real unreality, outfitted similarly for us with sounds and sights, flavors and textures. It was like meeting someone whose sense of the Divine matches up with yours, and the agreement itself serves as a corroboration.

Then he got older, and he read on his own and went to movies with his friends. Tucking him in at night, or driving him home from the multiplex, or talking with him over the phone once he was in college, I would listen as he related, in vivid detail, the stories he’d encountered. If it was a book or film I was unfamiliar with, I’d nod, envisioning what he was describing, almost as if I’d read it or seen it myself. If it was something I, too, had known, perhaps an Eugene O’Neill or Tom Stoppard play he was reading for his theater major, one I’d read years before, there might be a vagueness on my part until I uncovered some moment of emotion or meaning. “Right?” he would affirm, his generation’s “Amen.” And we were back, clicked into place, into that shared space.

2.
I pay the bill and we grab his bags, though he won’t let me carry anything. Outside it is raining. We walk the two blocks from the restaurant to the train station. He wants to say goodbye before he climbs the stairs that will allow him to cross over to the platform on the other side.

“Don’t wait,” he says.

When we hug, I can feel his heart pounding through both our jackets. Anxiety or merely the strain of carrying heavy luggage?

I do what he wants and head back down the street to my car. Even as I reach into my coat pocket for the keys, I turn in the direction of the station, trying for a glimpse at the track. There’s something I need before he goes, something I am slightly desperate to gather in, to harvest and horde. It is the boy. Somewhere hidden beneath the beard and the deep voice and the earnestness with which he’s thrown himself at this story of his life, is a remnant of my boy. It is dark and cold and the street is wet, and I begin to run. Some part of me thinks I won’t survive this leave-taking, as if it is the final rehearsal for the ultimate separation, intimated in the first cry, then reproduced in every misunderstanding, in all isolation, in each rejection, and in the very planing down of the mystery of love to something I too often have tried to measure.

When Nathaniel was only a few months old, I remember riding with him in the back seat of my parents’ car. It was nighttime, and my father was driving. I stared down into the rear-facing infant car seat beside me and silently pleaded with the baby staring back at me to forgive me. I understood the deal. I understood that I was supposed to be the mother. I wanted to be the mother, but I did not have the least idea of how to do that. This is the love I have, I told him. It feels big and powerful, but there’s no way to know if it, if I, will be worthy of you.

The position of the little station house obscures my view of the platform, so I keep walking, through ankle deep wet leaves, beyond where the parking meters end. I find that if I press my left cheek flush against the metal of the wrought iron fence guarding the tracks, I can see Nathaniel on the inbound side. He’s under a light. He moves back and forth from where he’s dropped his bags to the yellow painted line on the platform. He keeps looking down the track for the train, though he’s looking in the wrong direction. I think to yell out to him, but this is stupid. He’s traveled to other continents by himself, and now lives in a city where, as he just told me, he routinely takes three or five subways a day. He knows about trains and tracks, schedules, and maps. I have never known him to get lost.

I am watching him as if I were watching a film, a young man on a cold, rainy night all alone on a train platform. What do I think will be revealed to me? I know what I want, some proof that what we experienced together mattered, that it had, has, value, that my love for him, for life, is not unrequited. I want to know that I was able to do it, that I succeeded at the thing I feared I could not do, that I have loved him enough for him to know it.

His back is to me as he walks, then stops. And when he turns around I see that he has lit a cigarette. The smoke and the fog and the sodium lights, all a kind of theatre from where I stand on the far side of the platform in the dark.

A novel-in-progress must have its aesthetic seductions (the shifting perspective, maybe, or the challenge of covering fifty years in ten pages, or the delight of a brilliant but unlikeable narrator), as well as some je ne sais quoi magic. You must remain inspired. How else to justify the slog?

1.
Over 46 million blogs exist on Tumblr. That figure is peanuts compared to the 845 million users on Facebook or the 462 million on Twitter, but the five-year-old company is currently enjoying a period of exponential growth. Given the its simplicity, this newfound popularity should come as no surprise. After all, it’s easy to use Tumblr — you hardly have to do anything. While users certainly have the ability to post original content to their blogs, the vast majority choose to “reblog” content previously posted by other users. In other words, to tumble is to appropriate — not generate — content. Almost every blog on Tumblr is a pastiche of images, memes, or quotes that belong to others. Whether Tumblr represents a unique form of self-expression or just another way to bookmark online curios is a different question; at the most basic level, however, we can say that each user’s blog represents an amalgamation of (possibly related) content. This ability to easily aggregate others’ content has allowed the platform to carve out a sizable niche on the Internet and earn the distinction of being one of today’s hippest (and most valuable) Internet properties. That said, we should recall that Tumblr is not the first technology to engage in this practice. Consider the early-modern European analogue to Tumblr: the commonplace book.
Maintained by writers such as John Milton and Ben Jonson, commonplace books were personal notebooks teeming with aphorisms, quotations, and annotations. In a world without Wikipedia, the commonplace book was especially handy for argumentation, for it was a reservoir of useful wisdom that could be memorized and deployed in rhetoric and composition. In fact, in his essay “The Commonplace Bee: A Celebration,” Princeton professor Anthony Grafton writes that the 16th-century humanist Justus Lipsius argued exclusively via citations he memorized from his commonplace book. Lipsius, who once offered to recite Tacitus with a dagger to his throat, liberally quoted other greats like St. Augustine, Cyprian, and Cicero in order to broadcast his erudition and insulate himself from criticism. “When challenged,” according to Grafton, Lipsius “replied, calmly, that his opponents, even if already old men, needed to go back to school.” (Maybe Lipsius served as inspiration for Newt Gingrich — last week’s New Yorker "Talk of The Town" noted that Gingrich has amassed dozens of shoeboxes’ worth of interesting quotes on scraps of paper since high school.)
But perhaps the phenomenon of keeping a commonplace book dates back even earlier than the Renaissance. Grafton notes that Seneca, first-century Roman Stoic philosopher, likened the commonplace book to a literary honeycomb:
We should follow...the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. These bees, as our Virgil says, "pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet." We could so blend these several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
Here Seneca described the intellectual synthesis that results from annotation in the commonplace book. His words also illustrated the dominant strain of thought regarding the commonplace book’s purpose, in which the book guided its owner en route to erudition. Given the onerous demands on those who wished to be learned, the commonplace book would serve as the ideal aid to scholars. Erasmus nicely situates us: “Anyone who wants to read through all types of authors (for once in a lifetime all literature must be read by anyone who wishes to be considered learned) will collect as many quotations as possible for himself.” No small task.
2.
True, like Tumblr users, owners of commonplace books actively compiled information. True, the “quote” button on the Tumblr dashboard seems especially reminiscent of commonplacing. And true, Tumblr serves as a memory aid in a similar vein, allowing one to bookmark and revisit content that, in the abyssal space of the Internet, might be impossible to find without the right keywords the next day. Tumblr may be all of these things, but it’s definitely not the study aid described above. But before we bust this analogy, let’s consider the commonplace book’s less serious purposes. While championing its role as a scholarly tool, Erasmus also extolled the commonplace book for its whimsical qualities. In describing Thomas More’s daughters, avid keepers of commonplace books, Erasmus delighted in the frivolous aspects to their art of commonplacing, observing, “they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate... there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends.” Entertaining friends with a witty anecdote — learned casually “here” and “there” — seems more like preparation for cocktail party repartee than for a career in academia. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius’ nonchalant approach to commonplacing resembles that of the average Tumblr user as well. Gellius, who Grafton introduces to us in “The Commonplace Bee,” said that “[he] used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any different plan or order.” Such carefree recording of interesting quotes is not different to what one sees on Tumblr, where untold numbers of daily, inspirational, or random quotes circulate in the site’s unpredictable ecosystem.
So commonplace books did not always serve scholarly ends — fine, you say. But what about the question of audience? Commonplace books were very private documents, while Tumblr pages are public. Well, this is only notionally true — the audience for a random, non-celebrity, unspecialized Tumblr blog is effectively zero. (Trust me — I speak from experience.) In this case, if information is public but not accessed by anyone, is the distinction between public and private still germane? The possibility that someone else — say, a future employer or girlfriend — could access one’s Tumblr blog could introduce an element of image-consciousness, but it’s unlikely that this fact would substantially alter the content of one’s collection of material created by others.
But the most serious flaw in the analogy regards the information society in which Tumblr exists: we live in an archival age, in which memory has reached a point of near-irrelevance. With the right keyword, we can instantly recall any message, photo, or article instantly. That memory is never endangered by the specter of forgetting endangers memory more than ever. Thanks to this ultimate memory aid, we never have to remember anything, so we forget. In the age of the commonplace book — an age of admittedly considerably less information — scholarly minds whizzed with quotations, constantly maintained because anything, if forgotten, could be lost forever. The stakes were high: aphorisms, entire speeches had to be deployed in conversation or rhetoric by heart — they weren’t just talismans to be reblogged because they seemed neat.
But maybe we’ve been too critical of Tumblr. It may lack to scholarly direction of the commonplace book, but there’s beauty in minutiae. What seems to be trivial could be of utmost importance. At the very least, the indirect, more playful medium of Tumblr is not inconsequential — its value just may not be legible to us yet. As Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei famously declaimed, “In this material world, the space for thought is narrowing; the world is lacking in imagination and meaning. Stories, dreams, fantasies — they could all become vehicles for expression.” That China has blocked access to Tumblr testifies to the platform’s potency as a vehicle for expression. Maybe we’ve underestimated the power of the reblog.
3.
In the case of the commonplace book at least, we have been operating under the assumption that the accumulation of knowledge is a noble enterprise, almost beyond reproach. Nietzsche, naturally, presents the dissenting voice. In “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” he writes that information only serves to weigh us down. “In the end modern man drags an immense amount of indigestible knowledge stones around with him, which on occasion rattle around in his belly, as the fairy tale has it.” Within the sphere of Tumblr, this question rears its head as well — do we really need to refresh our Dashboard again to see if Zooey Deschanel or our ex-boyfriend has posted something new? From this Nietzschean point of view, the acquisition of knowledge doesn’t only fail to improve our lives — it makes them more difficult.
Oscar Wilde would agree. In "De Profundis," he wrote, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” In the practices of commonplacing and reblogging, this last phrase has literally become true: their passions a reblog. While Nietzsche warned us about history’s capability to imprison us, Wilde would be more concerned that these technologies could efface our identities and, as a result, diminish our capacity for original thought. On one’s Tumblr page, consciously or not, one forms one’s identity by appropriating other people’s words and images. And when using a commonplace book, as demonstrated by Justus Lipsius, one undergoes an exercise in recitation, not ratiocination. Wilde is right — these collections, online or in print, induce a sort of intellectual passivity.
In ultimately questioning the dangers of both the commonplace book and Tumblr — departing from the initial task of sorting out the imperfect analogy between them — we’ve now said so much as to say nothing definitive. We’ve evaded responsibility for an all-consuming conclusion and instead now sit at the intersection of these two technologies, at once so similar and so different. Consider the Tumblr blog. Consider the commonplace book. And then, finally, consider your consideration of the two.
Image: Wikimedia

1.Many of my favorite books – Dracula, The Rings of Saturn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – came to me as assigned reading. Even more than specific titles, I inherited my favorite authors from professors: Nicholson Baker, Harryette Mullen, Turgenev, George Saunders.
This literary bestowal carries on into adulthood as I seek my favorite authors’ favorite authors. At HTMLGIANT, Blake Butler started a broad compendium of David Foster Wallace’s favorite works, encompassing books he blurbed, books assigned on his syllabus, books mentioned in interviews and in passing. It is a nourishing list, a place to turn when I think about what I should read next.
But my road with the recommendations of my favorite authors has been unpaved and rocky.
I devoured U and I, Nicholson Baker’s endearing, humorous volume on John Updike. I loved that he read the copyright page of each Updike book, tracing where essays or excerpts had been previously published. U and I is about Updike, yes, but it is more about Baker wrestling with Updike’s impact on a personal level. Early in the book he lays it out: “I was not writing an obituary or a traditional critical study, I was trying to record how one increasingly famous writer and his books, read and unread, really functioned in the fifteen or so years of my life since I had first become aware of his existence…”
Because the book is about Baker not about Updike, I found it easy to like. Baker recounts the 125th anniversary party for The Atlantic where Tim O’Brien tells him that he and Updike golf together: “I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf.”
And so, under Baker’s tutelage, I read John Updike. More accurately, I tried to read Updike, tried and tried. Rabbit, Run. Pigeon Feathers. The Poorhouse Fair. I didn’t finish any of them, I barely started them. I would have scoured Couples for the passage where Updike compares a vagina to a ballet slipper – which Baker mentions – if I could have gotten through the second chapter.
After quoting his own mother and Nabokov, Baker tells me, “There is no aphoristic consensus to deflect and distort the trembly idiosyncratic paths each of us may trace in the wake of the route that the idea of Updike takes through our consciousness.” Updike is not an idea that is tracing its way – neither trembling nor idiosyncratic – through my consciousness. There is no Updike boat leaving a wake in the waves of my mind like a yacht leaving Cape Cod for the Vineyard.
Rather than accept that Baker and I – being of different eras and different genders – have different taste, I concluded that I must be intellectually and creatively deficient; I am a bad reader. I was disappointed in myself for disappointing the Nicholson Baker in my mind, shaking his bearded head, tut-tutting at me: Poor girl, she’ll never understand.
A few months ago I picked up The Anthologist and started it, in the midst of other selections. (When the book came out last September, I actually drove twenty miles to Marin to see Baker read. I was the youngest member of the audience by thirty years. But I am afraid to buy a book at a reading, and petrified of the prospect of having an author sign the book. I could make a fool of myself as Baker did when asking Updike to sign a book in the early 80s.)
Then a couple weeks ago I received a mass email from a writer I know about how he was reading The Anthologist, and I felt the urge to pick it up again. He even said, “I’m really loving The Anthologist.”
I haven’t read everything by Baker, but I’ve read a bunch and enjoyed it on my own; yet, his authoritative praise weighs more than my own evaluation.
2.
Recently in Maine in a used bookstore (that was also the bookseller’s refurbished garage), I stumbled on three of Carson McCullers’ books for $1 each. (In case you are wondering, and you should be wondering, I was not close to Nicholson Baker’s home in Maine, but further up the coast near E.B. White’s former home, near the county fair where Fern bought Wilbur.) The cover of the tattered McCullers paperback proclaimed “One of the finest writers of our time” from The New York Times. I couldn’t recall exactly where I’d heard her name, but it was vaguely familiar. I bought all three.
I started The Ballad of the Sad Café and she drew me into her vivid, textured Southern world. Her descriptions are precise ideas: “The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.”
She commands the reader and directs me what to do: “See the hunchback marching in Miss Amelia’s footsteps when on a red winter morning they set out for the pinewoods to hunt… See them working on her properties… So compose from such flashes an image of these years as a whole. And for a moment let it rest.” This second-person imperative jumped out of the smooth, poetic narrative, but it fit like a nest on a tree. McCullers is unafraid to acknowledge you and make you do what she thinks you should. Yet she maintains authorial distance and control by refraining from the first person while directing your attention like a gentle guide: “Now some explanation is due for all this behavior,” she opens an aside on the nature of love. She then elides authority by saying, “It has been mentioned before that Miss Amelia was once married.”
Even before I’d finished the novella, though, I dug around online to verify my delight. Didn’t I read somewhere that David Foster Wallace liked her? Did I remember a retrospective on her in the TLS? No, I didn’t, I was mistaken. Try as I may, the highest compliment I found was from Graham Greenewho said, “Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility.” Now, don’t get me wrong. Graham Greene is fine, but I didn’t even finish The End of the Affair, and he is nowhere near my top ten. From whom did I inherit McCullers?
My Internet searching revealed some critical acclaim (in the Modern Library Revue column on The Millions, for one) and she is mentioned in the same breath as Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, W.H. Auden, and Tennessee Williams, each time with a different, equally flattering comparison.
But I was disappointed. In myself? In McCullers? In other authors who did not love her as I am growing to?
I suppose if I can find an author and grow to love them outside of a direct inheritance, maybe, too, I could reject select elements of my more obvious literary heritage. Hesitantly, I have begun to dismiss other favorites’ favorites. When a former student of his published David Foster Wallace’s syllabus, I promptly downloaded the PDF. As I read the list, I was very self-assured: I’d been meaning to read Waiting for the Barbarians! I loved the Flannery O’Connor story he assigned (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”). He boldly included young contemporary writers like Aimee Bender and Sam Lipsyte. But Silence of the Lambs. Really? I would not follow him there. Maybe I am only disadvantaging myself. Silence of the Lambs may be the literary masterwork that could forever change my outlook on literature and fiction, just like Updike was supposed to.
Where I formerly swallowed recommendations whole, I now cull through them – not exactly on my own but in a more independent fashion. I find books, I do not just receive them. Or, I try to.
I am not a bad reader nor am I intellectually and creatively deficient, or, if I am, it is not because I do not like John Updike but for entirely different reasons.

6 comments:

This is beautiful.
As a new mother, now at the stage where I’m wondering how to be a mother, or if my love can be worthy of my son, this essay touches my hopes and fears about our relationship in the future. I often wonder what kind of man he will be, and I constantly hope that at 22, he’ll be self-sufficient, as your son is. Still, I fear the day that he leaves me. Thank you so much for sharing this.

1.
The Whippany River flooded my hometown post office in August 2011. Hurricane Sandy would cause far more damage statewide, but Irene pushed the river across Route 10 and through the front door. The post office has never reopened. Whippany now receives irregular delivery from the Morristown branch. Inquires from our congressman, Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, have received circuitous responses from the Postal Service.
I drive past the abandoned post office when I visit my parents, and can’t help but get nostalgic. The mail was a source of surprise during my youth: issues of Amazing Spider Man, Uncanny X-Men, and The Sporting News, letters from my French pen pal, or postcards from my sister in college. I would shoot baskets in my driveway so I could catch afternoon delivery. The low hum of the mail truck’s engine announced its arrival, and while it looped toward my mailbox, I envied the lives of those mail carriers. They delivered people’s hopes and disappointments, bound in rubber bands. There was a quiet dignity to the legion of men and women who delivered mail. It seemed like the entire town counted on this ritual.
That innocent perception has been tempered by our current reality. The United States Postal Service lost $334 million in the final quarter of 2013, for a total loss of $5 billion for the year. First-class mail revenue has plummeted. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has pushed to end Saturday mail delivery as a cost-saving measure, but Congress has blocked the attempt. Postal Service retail outlets are being opened in select Staples stores, and will be staffed by store employees, not members of the American Postal Workers Union.
In 2014, products are shipped to us. We are recipients of mail rather than creators of it. Bills are paid online. Invitations are sent on Facebook. Letters, handwritten or typed, are a rarity. We have chosen speed and convenience, and have redefined what it means to have a personal connection with another human.
2.
The current literary magazines that only accept postal submissions are some of the finest “little magazines” in the country: The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Epoch, The Southern Review, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, The Sewanee Review, Denver Quarterly, The Hudson Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, The Paris Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, River Styx, ZYZZYVA, and Image. Their reasons are both practical and philosophical. The Gettysburg Review’s explanation is tongue-in-cheek: “We’re not an e-journal or e-zine...Neither are we neo-Luddites. Several of us actually enjoy using computers; however, we, like many of you, understand that the computer is not necessarily a piece of labor-saving technology. E-submission, while possibly a convenience for writers, is definitely an inconvenience for us.”
Electronic submissions have evolved from direct e-mails to editors, to the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses’ Submission Manager, to the now industry-standard Submittable system. Since electronic submissions have become the norm, editors have complained about writers who submit new work immediately after a rejection is received, or, even worse, rescind a submission only to revise and resubmit the work. Electronic submissions have put the writer in the editor’s office, like some cinematic wordsmith tramping into Random House with a manuscript under his arm. I would never think of calling the editor of the Southwest Review to check on the status of my submission, but e-mailing that editor somehow feels less intrusive. It shouldn’t, and unfortunately results in some writers eschewing professional decorum. Until an unsolicited work is accepted for publication, there should be a comfortable distance between writer and editor.
At Electric Literature’sRecommended Reading page, Agni editor Sven Birkets recalls the “labor-intensive era before e-submissions, [when] going through the stack that was several days’ accumulation had certain assembly-line aspects: open, extract, examine to gauge general caliber, sort into one of several stacks. Return, return with note, look closer, pass to trusted readers.” While putting together the first issue of his editorship, Birkets received a snail mail submission from David Foster Wallace. The story was titled “The Soul is Not a Smithy.” This was 2003; Wallace could have placed the story anywhere. Birkets was excited: “I took myself away from the desk. I found a private place with decent light and no phone; I did whatever one does to narrow the beam of attention down from wide-angle receptivity to full-on focus.” Granted, Birkets knew Wallace, but the story was a surprise, and Wallace’s work and self were made new by the spontaneity of that silent submission.
T.C. Boyle has called literary magazines the “meat and potatoes” of American literature. His first collection, Descent of Man, was published in 1979, and although it included stories from “the slicks” -- The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Penthouse -- it also included stories that originally appeared in The Paris Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, The Transatlantic Review, Fiction, Quest 77, Quest 78 and the South Dakota Review. Those publications were not merely means toward the end of a book; they were small victories. As Ben Percy writes, even after acceptances have “become the rule rather than the exception,” he feels like a “lonely madman crumpling messages into bottles and sending them off into a midnight sea.” The responses from editors make for a distant but real community. Nowadays writers like myself have connected on social media with other writers and editors, and while those connections are often meaningful and sometimes enlightening, writers remain solitary artists. As Percy notes, we are all “hidden away, only occasionally showing our faces, but engaged in an intimate, sacred togetherness made possible by journals whose pages serve as ink-stained harbors.”
3.
My favorite bookstore is still D.J. Ernst Books in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The bookseller has an almost cult following since 1975 among undergraduate creative writing majors at Susquehanna University. I bought armfuls of books, but mostly talked with “Homer” about fishing for bass in Penns Creek, running, kayaking, and God. Like other great independent bookstores, it was a place that made me believe imagination mattered.
I bought the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories from him. I’d loved Robert Stone’sDog Soldiers, and he edited that year’s selections. It’s an incredible collection: “Days of Heaven” by Rick Bass, “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” by Robert Olen Butler, “Emergency” by Denis Johnson, “The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones, “Carried Away” by Alice Munro, and my favorite of the lineup, “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace. I had read novels and collections from those individual writers, but I liked seeing them collected in an original form, with the magazines of original publication listed below. It was a lesson: American literary culture is built through literary magazines.
I flipped to the back of the book: “Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories.” This was 2000, so much of the information was outdated, but there were mailing addresses and names of editors. Puerto del Sol: PO Box 3E, Department of English, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003. Edited by Kevin McIlvoy and Antonya Nelson. Virginia Quarterly Review: One West Range, Charlottesville, VA 22903. Edited by Staige D. Blackford. I would dip back between the stories and their original publications to find which magazines best fit my style. I say style and not substance: I was very much a young writer, and it would take a steady dose of sentence-to-sentence examinations of writers like James Alan McPherson, Joy Williams, and William Gass in order to understand fiction.
My fiction professor had a “Publish or Paris” cartoon on his office door, and the pun wasn’t lost on me. In order to be a writer, I also had to be a submitter. I printed some of my stories and followed the magazine’s guidelines. I typed and signed cover letters. I prepared SASEs, which felt like a strangely formal and unnecessary action to receive a response: folding an envelope and stuffing it into another envelope is the literary equivalent of matryoshka dolls. I soon understood that literary magazine editors and staff had to deal with cataloging, reading, and responding to thousands of submissions, as well as pleading for university or donor funding. They didn’t have the time or money to buy and provide stamps for responses.
I mailed stories to Cimarron Review, Artful Dodge, and Prairie Schooner. I thought about the submissions from time to time, but I was an undergraduate with more than enough distractions. The form rejections arrived on thick, cardboard stock cards, or on computer paper sliced into squares. There was the occasional “Thanks!” or a suggestion to subscribe. No meant no. There were no explanations. I needed to hear those cold, distant rejections. My writing mentors were constructive but caring: they would edit my stories down to the single sentence worth saving, but they would do so with guidance and interest. Editors owed me nothing: no words of encouragement, no line edits, and not a swift response. In order to impress them, I had to write better fiction. I knew that writing was a slow process on my end. I scribbled story and character ideas on napkins, in the margins of junk mail and newspapers, or in a series of notebooks. Those ideas became handwritten drafts, which were typed, printed, set aside, and then revised on the printed page. I typed those revisions, and then repeated the process. Ideas come in a flash, but stories must be built. I am the son of a carpenter who almost became a priest: planning and ritual are the modes of our lives.
Back then, I had no idea what happened to my submissions when they left the post office. Did editors really read my stories? I had an intimate connection with my own drafting, writing, and revising, but my submitting life was wrecked with unknowns. Submittable is a wonderful resource, but I long for those days when I don’t know whether a story is “received” or “in progress.” The method of write, submit, and resubmit has its real artistic perils. At the National Post, poet Michael Lista thinks the contemporary literary culture “encourages, for its own survival, a writer’s worst attributes: vanity, assuredness, sophistry, mutual flattery, imprecision, inefficiency and an unselfconscious fluency that is the surest sign of a minor writer. The qualities that contribute to producing great work — skepticism, deliberation, patience — are not in the system’s interest.” The ease of submission has cultivated a lack of self-discernment. Simply because a story can be submitted does not mean it should.
I miss having my envelope of stories weighed and mailed. I miss the handling of paper, the process of submission. The great, unlikely gift of postal submissions was the building of patience and discipline. Now we can publish at any and every moment: status updates, tweets, posts. There are benefits to tearing down those fences between our words and the world, but there is worth to relative silence, to communication between a single sender and recipient.
This is how I satiate my nostalgia for the old rituals. I go through my typical motions of drafting and revising, until a story feels ready to submit. I find a few potential markets and list them in an Excel spreadsheet. Then I print the story, fold it, and leave it in an unsealed envelope, tucked in a desk drawer. Weeks later, I take that story from the envelope and read it with new eyes: the eyes of an editor, a discerning reader who does not owe me anything. Those weeks of gestation are an abbreviation of the response time to a postal submission, but they are metaphorically enough. Postal submissions taught writers that this vocation is not a sprint. Writing is a series of marathons separated by long respites, where we regain breath and build strength. It is time for writers to slow down again, so that our performance in the next race can be better, more meaningful, and if we are lucky, closer to the eternal, mysterious rewards of art.
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Authors are writing from a networked world and seeing life through that lens whether they allow it to their characters or not. So why not embrace it? Why not make it matter, because it already does however much we doth protest?